At 7.30pm on Saturday night, crowds in New York's Times Square were irritated by a police cordon sealing off the street with the highest density of theatres in the city: west 45th, between Eighth avenue and Broadway, home to five productions including the two biggest shows in town, The Lion King and Billy Elliot.

Tourists shuffled like buffalo to find alternatives routes, while impatient New Yorkers slipped, cursing, between them. It seemed like a routine disruption even when, at the western end of 46th street, people crept under the barrier and a policeman bore down on them bellowing with what in retrospect sounded like panic: "People! There is a car on fire and it might explode. Unless you want to get hurt, I suggest you move. NOW." In classic New York style people scowled and muttered "jerk".

What turned out to be a failed car bomb caused major disruption at the heart of Broadway on Saturday night, but by this morning New Yorkers and their guests were shrugging the whole thing off with reflex bravado.

"See these buildings?" said a man idling beneath a giant poster of Al Pacino. "They're still standing."

The tagline on the Pacino poster read: "Is this the face of a killer?"

The bomb was discovered in a Nissan SUV by a street vendor who saw smoke seeping out and alerted a mounted policeman. The city's mayor, Michael Bloomberg, described it as an "amateurish effort" and by this morning, after the area had been evacuated and the car towed and destroyed at a firing range in the Bronx, Times Square was fully operational again.

Still, there were signs of disturbance. At the southern end of the square, behind a hut which has served since 1946 as the most famous army recruitment centre in the US, three armed men in counter-terrorism T-shirts politely aided tourists asking for directions to the discount ticket booth. "Everything I know I got from CNN," said a large, red-haired officer. The only increased security on site was a fleet of community support volunteers, who, he said with mild disdain, were there to "answer people's questions".

Despite satellite trucks parked on every corner, most people in Times Square were unaware of what had happened.

Patricia and Paul Figueras, from Gloucester, only heard about the car bomb when their daughter phoned them in alarm that morning. They marshalled a Blitz spirit to rival the Americans' and said "absolutely not," at the suggestion it might spoil their holiday or prevent them from attending a Broadway show that evening.

Those who suffered the worst disruption were guests at the Marriott hotel, outside which the car had been parked. "We weren't let back until 3am," said Beth Griffin, from Virginia, on a girls' weekend with two friends. The three of them, along with other guests, were taken in by the Crowne Plaza, where they were housed in the banquet room, given refreshments and finally allowed to return to their hotel. "We haven't changed our plans at all," said Griffin, "except to take a nap."

Deborah and Ronan Sharkey were evacuated from their 22nd floor room to a conference room on the far side of the hotel, where they were given pillows and blankets. They weren't alarmed when they heard a car bomb had been parked beneath their window, because, said Sharkey, with a small jut of his chin: "We're Irish. We've seen worse than this at home." A NYPD command post was set up outside the Booth theatre, which advertised on its hoardings a Pulitzer-prize winning show called Next to Normal. A gallery of fresh-faced twenty-somethings smiling beneath the tagline "More than a feel-good musical, it's a feel-everything musical" provided an odd backdrop to the swarm of men in suits, ties and crew cuts, milling about waiting to start the criminal investigation.

Across the street, three cleaners stood smoking and eyeing them at the trade entrance to the Marriott.

"All these fools coming over here trying to do us damage?" said Gladys, narrowing her eyes. "I'm not worried. I've got the man upstairs looking out for me." Her colleague, Linda, was determined to find something good in the incident. "This kind of thing only makes tourists want to come here even more. For the excitement."

Another, less official command post established itself at the Starbucks on the corner, where barristas discussed whether or not they had heard an explosion and spoke of wanting to get out of town after their shift as quickly as possible; patrons, for the most part, were concerned about whether or not their theatre tickets would be refunded, or whether terrorism fell under an "act of God" get-out clause.

"Are you kidding me?" said Carin Fox, from New York, clutching two unused tickets for the cancelled performance of Next to Normal.

Further up the street, past God of Carnage at the Jacobs, A Behanding in Spokane at the Schoenfeld, Billy Elliot at the Imperial and Red at the Golden, a dog handler investigated a lone bin outside the Minskoff, where the Lion King was playing.

Albert Meyer, from Boston, was in New York for his high school reunion. He left the hotel on Saturday night and, realised, walked straight past the Nissan: "If it had gone off, I'd be gone." Mocking the would-be bomber's credentials, he said "a serious Jerusalem bomber could've wiped this place out".

Instead, the bomb's reliance on a combination of gasoline, propane, two clocks with batteries and something referred to by the mayor as "consumer-grade" fireworks indicated, Meyer said, that "whoever did this sounds like an incompetent nutcase".

Vendors in Times Square had come on shift this morning for the most part ignorant of the bomb scare. Their attitude mirrored that of Lance Orton, man of the hour, the T-shirt vendor and veteran who seemed completely uninterested in his own heroism.

A vendor called Saleh, cooking kebabs beneath a poster of Lady Gaga on West 57th street had no idea about the bomb, nor was he much interested. "Sounds normal to me," he said and served his next customer, while a passer-by shouted to the red haired man from counter-terrorism, "Good morning, officer," with only a touch too much brightness.